[P1] OT: Software Licensing

[Larry Kollar]

Rolling up several replies....

> Of the Adobe suite, until OS X I hadn't upgraded my own computer for 
> years so I can't speak about more recent versions but I am quite 
> certain that Illustrator 3 did allow notebook/desktop installations.

Adobe's FrameMaker license explicitly allows you to install a copy on a 
laptop as long as you're not running the same program on both machines 
at the same time. This is actually a small step backward from the 
previous license, which allowed a second install on a "home computer." 
Fortunately, I was planning to get an iBook anyway. :) I think 
Illustrator 10 allows it as well, but I prefer using xfig (uglier than 
sin and not quite as easy to get into, but it does what I want without 
assuming I'm an artiste).

> Because we can easily copy it to another computer or steal a copy that 
> has been serialized we think we should be able to.

I think the general complaint is that many titles previously allowed us 
to install a second copy on a laptop or home computer, and now they 
expect us to buy two copies. (Sure, if you cut the price in half first.)

> Open Software is an answer to the commercial licensing fees. Is any of 
> it very good?

Depends on your definition of "very good." Most Free and Open Source 
software was written for Linux and other Un*x-ish systems, so many of 
those programs can be compiled & run on OSX. However, the interface is 
quite different, which is why you need the X11 software to run most of 
it. They tend to stress functionality and power over well-designed 
interfaces. Since I'm old enough to have regularly used computers that 
had only a command-line interface, such things don't faze me. :-P

I mentioned Xfig above; it does a lot of the same things that Visio can 
do, if you can stand the interface. Actually, once you understand what 
it's doing, the interface is very efficient and lets you bang up a line 
drawing in a jiffy. Another program I use regularly is groff, the free 
replacement for troff; you enter tags (commands) by hand in a text 
editor and groff uses them to build a PostScript file. It sounds 
hideous, especially if all you've ever known is WYSIWYG editing... but 
for maintaining large technical documents, it works even better than 
FrameMaker (which is probably the best GUI tool for the job).

OpenOffice is supposed to be getting pretty good, at least more 
functional than AppleWorks, and again it's free. Some people are 
working at Aqua-fying the interface for OSX, but the X11 version is the 
best way to go for now.

The upshot is: if you're willing to be flexible & do a little learning, 
you can replace a *lot* of commercial titles with Free software. There 
are still some situations where commercial apps still have the edge -- 
like working with bitmaps for print, you can't toss Photoshop and use 
GIMP for that. Commercial OCR software is a long way ahead of Free 
programs like gocr, but if you only have to scan a short doc one time, 
it's still faster than typing it all by hand. I can think of several 
commercial software titles I would need if I were to start the business 
I'm considering, but I could do a lot of work using Free software and 
home-grown scripts.
--
Larry Kollar    k  o  l  l  a  r  @  a  l  l  t  e  l  .  n  e  t
"The hardest part of all this is the part that requires thinking."
-- Paul Tyson, on xml-doc